Re: OT: Spatial thinking (WAS: Re: Letf / Right, was Re: Count and mass nouns)

E fésto Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>:
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> Roger Mills scripsit:
>>
>> > Grids are BOring; mazes like Boston - London - Paris are beautiful.
>>
>> All very well, but when moving about on foot, there is an immense
>> advantage to knowing that if one is on 22nd St., 23rd St. may be
>> reached by walking in the canonical positive direction (north in
>> New York, west in Philadelphia).  Boston's system provides
>> easy navigation -- if you are a cow.
>
> That has nothing to do with a grid, though; it comes from a neumeric
> system. Melbourne's CBD is a grid, and how do you know that going east
> from Elizabeth St gets you to Swantson St? or north from Collins St gets
> you to Bourke St?
In Denver, this is easy--while the east-west streets are numbered
numerically, incrementing as you travel northward[1], the north-south
streets are in most places named alphabetically.

A route I took regularly to work a few months back crossed (in order, west
to east) Brentwood, Balsam, Ammons, Zephyr, Yarrow, Wadsworth (a main
street), Vance, Upham, Teller, Saulsbury, Reed, Quay, Pierce, and Otis.

A consequence of this is a lot of oddly-named streets around the unsightly
end of the alphabet...



        *Muke!
[1] The exception being Colfax Ave., which stands for *15th Ave, and of
course south of 1st it switches to haphazard naming.
[2] Areas that leave the grid system tend to devolve into chaos.  There's
a neighborhood where 104th (I think is the number) has a 104th St, 104th
Ct, 104th Circle, etc., all crossing each other...
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